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Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Girls on film

OK, one more Blast from the pre-Sokal Past before I get back to Steve Fuller.

Every schoolchild knows that the Sokal Hoax proved everything people wanted it to prove:  that Sokal showed how many “theorists” write about science despite not knowing very much about it; that he revealed the fatuousness of interpretive theory; that he saved the left from its irrationalist wing; that he struck a blow for plain speech and against obfuscatory jargon; that he demonstrated the vacuity of the humanities as they are taught in American colleges today; that he disclosed the cliqueishness and claqueishness of cultural studies; and that he proved that Anglo-American analytic philosophy is true and that Continental philosophy since Nietzsche is false. 

Well, as I argue in Rhetorical Occasions, Alan Sokal’s hoax pretty much nailed the first and sixth of these—the first by way of the previously-published material cited in his essay, and the sixth, of course, by way of the essay’s acceptance by Social Text.  His post-hoax claims about the second, third, and fourth were, I think, overdrawn; he never argued or endorsed the fifth, to his credit; and he didn’t have much interest in the seventh, though some analytic philosophers have been more than happy to pretend, in the intervening years, that the whole thing was really about them all along.

(No, I’m not quite this telegraphic in the book itself.  I spin out a more detailed argument over the course of about a hundred pages, an argument informed in places by long and largely fruitful exchanges with Sokal himself, way back in 1996-99.)

But in the course of my recent review of the relevant literature, I came upon a few gems from the book that started it all, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science.  And it reminded me of two things: one, there were some good reasons why people on my side of the quad dismissed Gross and Levitt when their book first appeared.  And two, there was more than enough silliness to go around back then.

The first excerpt suggests a certain, er, defensiveness with regard to sexism in academe:

We take a position that is not likely, in the climate described, to endear us to a majority of our colleagues in or out of the sciences, or to the political and administrative avant-garde.  It is that sexist discrimination, while certainly not vanished into history, is largely vestigial in the universities; that the only widespread, obvious discrimination today is against white males. (110)

This is not terribly idiosyncratic; lots of people say more or less the same thing.  But I love the phrase “administrative avant-garde.” Professor Gross?  Professor Levitt?  Dean Alfred Jarry will see you now!

A page later, they brace themselves for battle, and that’s when things get a little weirder:

Of course these remarks violate the feminist metaphysics according to which every institution of this society is irremediably sexist, and every male, even the most sympathetic, ineradicably guilty by association with it.  Some positions, even among persons brought up in the logophallocentric West, are well beyond the reach of rational argument.  Feminist fundamentalism shares that distinction with other dogmatisms, such as religious fundamentalism; and when all is said and done, similar mentalities give rise to both. (111)

Uh, guys, it’s “phallogocentric,” not “logophallocentric.” Just saying.

And then a dozen pages later, a deservedly famous passage—one that many textual scholars have attributed not to Gross and Levitt but to John Derbyshire:

If there were any longer anything like a hegemonic, white, masculinist slant to popular natural and social science, denunciation of it would be proper.

The shoe, however, is now on the other foot.  Anyone who gives prime-time television a passing glance (we hope none of our readers give it more) is familiar with today’s universal spin, for example, on women’s careers.  Who has not looked sidewise at the screen and seen a beautiful young woman (political correctness in the media does not yet frown upon “lookism”), high heels, lipstick and all, leaping about with her 9-mm. Beretta held, two-handed, in the approved barrel-up manner, dodging around corners, stalking a murderous criminal?  Who has not seen her straddle and handcuff the oaf, toward the end of the show?  Who has not seen the impenetrably tough, young woman lawyer face down a crooked male judge in court, and then, as a sop to story line and the connectedness of women, make a lonely phone call to her mother, or her sister, late at night?  Who, for that matter, hasn’t seen the new, standard children’s books, in which Mama Bear, like Papa Bear, goes to work or runs a honey-packing business?  Who is so asleep as not to have noticed that Dagwood of the funnies, always an amiable dunce, is today a bigger jerk than ever, now that Blondie is a successful businesswoman while he remains under the thumb of his boss? (123-24)

Who, indeed? (smiling politely and searching the room for the nearest safe exit).

Personally, my faves are the approved barrel-up manner and the sidewise look at the screen (I imagine that Gross or Levitt happened to turn on the TV during CBS’s now-notorious week-long Femme Nikita marathon in October 1993).  But that late-night phone call and the Dagwood finale are good too, and the whole thing rocks pretty hard in the aggregate.  The high-heeled shoe is very clearly on the other oaf-handcuffing foot, no question about it.  Or something like that.

Yes, yes, I know, Gross and Levitt uncovered some serious mischief on the part of people who didn’t know their Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture from their Lorentz transformation.  But “truth” be told, they had some funny little quarks—oops!  I mean quirks—of their own, as well.

Now, don’t worry, folks, I don’t spend all my time in Rhetorical Occasions going after low-hanging fruit.  That’s this blog’s job!  In the book I am the very model of judiciousness and equanimity, as measured by my own deluxe Judiciousness and Equanimity Calipers, which I recently purchased online from Phrenology Associates.

Oh, and I want to thank Sean Carroll for looking over a couple of pages in my opening essay and reminding me that the Calabi-Yau space involved in superstring theory accounts for only six of the eleven dimensions.  I didn’t even know that the number of dimensions in Calabi-Yau space had to be even!  D’oh.  Is my face red!  Or infrared, if you’re receding from me at a very high speed.

Posted by Michael on 12/07 at 01:42 PM
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